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Some might call this a nice problem to have. As Product Hunt gets bigger, more popular, and populated by a seemingly endless supply of apps, gizmos, and software extensions; actually finding items that may interest an individual user becomes increasingly challenging. The site's solution: The just-launched "Topics" feature, which filters the site's offerings into specific buckets that make it easy to find anything related to, for example, Slack, drones, or Donald Trump.

To see how this change could effect the future of the site, I sat down with Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover for a surprisingly candid conversation about Topics, where the site is headed, and the challenges of curating a community.

So, what's going on with Product Hunt these days?

We just launched Topics this week. We're starting with 300 different Topics around all different kinds of things from drones to Internet of Things to emoji to apps to business podcasts. It's a way for us, and a lot of the community, to start curating all these things that are in different interests. Users can follow these Topics so they can stay up to date. If I'm in the drone space, for example, I want to get updated on all the new drone products out there and all the new drone hardware and so on.

It's the next evolution of Product Hunt. As we have more and more products and more and more types of people come on, how do we build a system and a platform that's more relevant to more people? In the beginning, we were one single homepage and everyone saw the same thing. How do we expand upon that over time?

So it's about taming the firehose, basically. I'm sure a lot of your early users are people who wanted to see every product in every category. And when you had a smaller number of products, that was a little bit easier to manage. But now that you're growing, you're going to have enthusiasts within different verticals who want select information. And perhaps communities will then build around these Topics as well.

Exactly. That's exactly the thought and yeah, the truth is that the same products may not appeal to everyone. You might think the number one thing on Product Hunt today is the best, most amazing thing in the world and I might be like, "Why is it even on there?"

We want to build in some level of personalization over time that creates more relevancy and then there's also just the reality that we have more and more things being created in the world. Not just apps and Chrome extensions, but we also have more people doing podcasts and more people writing books and more people making games and even more things in categories that Product Hunt isn't in. We have more people making music and more people creating hardware. All this creation is happening.

Eventually you probably have a plan to list, not just products—which can mean so many different things—but anything that people create, right?

Longer term. We hope Product Hunt is the place to discover your next favorite thing, which is how we're describing ourselves and that's very broad intentionally. People have different interests in various things. My mom loves photography and she would love to stay up to date on new photography apps and hardware and so on. And the same is true for other people in other categories. We're near a yoga studio right now. There are people who geek out about yoga stuff and they want to find the best and the newest in that space too.

You're starting with 300, which is a lot of Topics. How granular do you get in terms of moderation and connecting to communities?

We haven't made any changes to the moderation system yet. We didn't have time to release it yet but soon we'll be releasing a way of sort of highlighting the best contributors within a particular Topic. The people that are basically adding the most valuable content, whether it's comments or posts, will be noted. As for new Topics going forward, the community ultimately will be the ones that create new Topics. People are starting to suggest them. One type that's interesting that came up was "Made in San Francisco," "Made in Paris," "Made in Vancouver, Canada," or "Made in New York."

Were there any Topics you proposed for the initial launch, and then you were surprised that there were so few things that fit in it? Or perhaps there were ones you where you were surprised by just how many things fit into it?

is I think one of the most followed, as of this morning. There are more than 300 Slack integrations and whatnot on Product Hunt, which is really a testament to the strength of their platform. That was surprising. I knew there were a lot but I didn't realize there were 300-plus and more and more of them every day.

In terms of Topics with few items, part of the opportunity is to help to create a place where the community can fill it with stuff that they normally wouldn't think to put on Product Hunt because it doesn't feel it's relevant, but it is very relevant inside of the specific Topic. Let's say parenting, for example. There are a bunch of parenting products. A lot of parents would want to find recommendations of not just a particular stroller, but also a list of what else they might need.

So are Topics currently assigned manually to items in the back catalogue? That seems like it could take a lot of time.

In the very beginning when we were building it out, me and the community team spent a lot of time on it. What we actually did is took some of the most upvoted stuff and then looked at each product and added Topics to those things. It's not 100-percent comprehensive, but it's a start. I think we indexed something like—and I'm guessing here—10,000 products that all have multiple Topics assigned within them.

Sounds like a Mechanical Turk project at some point.

Yeah, we were thinking about that too. We had some nervousness around that. This is a short-term solution. What was good about that exercise, as painful as it was to manually go through and do all that, is that it did allow us to then realize, "Oh, we're missing a Topic on this thing," or "Oh, we're starting to see a trend that certain things have a lot of Topics and certain things don't have very many Topics."

Seeing the commonalities and the patterns that emerged sounds like it will prove to be a very important part of the process. At some point I'm assuming it's going to be like a subreddit-type situation where the community can post or create topics of their own?

Yeah. We're starting out where people can suggest Topics and then we have an internal page where we then see all the suggestions. The reason why we're doing it this way to start is because we just want to be careful. If you open it to the world and then they create something that's maybe offensive. Let's say, if someone made a topic that was like, "Shitty products," that'd be disappointing, right?

You don't want Topics to just become a hashtag.

Exactly, so we've got to find the right balance of opening it up and that's why this is a good first step in doing that.

Which Topic are you personally most excited to explore and see grow?

This one's silly. The pranking products is one of my favorites. It's a bunch of prank apps and tools and things to prank your friends. I think it's fun and then there's more utilitarian things that maybe I'm not in particular excited about but I know that other people will be. Increasingly people are using Product Hunt as a source of inspiration but also a source of intelligence. If you're building something, you should know all the competitors. You should know all the products. This will give people an easy way to follow a list with some areas.

It seems like you guys made a concerted effort to keep many of the Topics fun and lighthearted.

Yeah. We wanted to make sure things were at some fun. When we describe our culture, one of the words is kittenish-like. Playful.

Before Topics, you were dividing up content into what you called "Categories", such as Tech or Books. Will that approach continue to live next to Topics, or is Topics designed to replace it?

That's a really good question. We're evaluating how these things influence each other over time. To start with, we're going to keep them as they are, in part, because we don't want to introduce too many things too quickly. There is a lot of value in having just things in Categories like we have now.

The primary function of Topics, then seems to be to better target content for specific users so you can move away from the one-size-fits-all approach—especially in regards to the homepage.

Yeah, exactly. Because the truth is there's no single homepage that will be ideal for all people in the world. With that said, I will emphasize is that we're not necessarily moving to a 100-percent personalized homepage where you and I see totally different things. I think it's good to have a balance of both, where there's a marriage of the town hall effect where everyone is talking about the number one, number two thing on Product Hunt. It's impactful. It's a part of our culture. It's a conversation.

There's always, I think, a power to the big shared headline. Even if you like at similar communities like Reddit, when something makes the homepage on Reddit, people will notice it. You don't want to remove that entirely.

Yeah, it works for Twitter. Like, your Twitter feed is totally different than mine and it works for that product. But for us, I think it needs to be a balance of both.